Trading Desk Market Update: 12/17

December 17, 2021

BTC is currently trading around $47,200 and ETH around $3,850.  Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are CVX, OKB, and CELO.  The global crypto market cap is $2.29T, down 3.3% over the last day.  DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$232b and BTC dominance is around 41%.

Many are attributing today’s weakness to central bank tightening, as the Bank of England raised its main interest rate to 0.25% yesterday, following the Fed’s revised expectations for three rate hikes in 2022 revealed on Wednesday.  Other notable news today includes: Russia is said to be deciding between a blanket crypto ban and legalizing exchanges; the US Senate has confirmed Rostin Behnam as CFTC chair; Kazakhstan is piloting a CBDC on R3’s Corda platform; HSBC and IBM created a successful multi-ledger CBDC demo; US federal credit union regulator the NCUA says credit unions can partner with crypto providers; layer two scaling solution Optimism officially removes its Whitelist; Bitwise has launched an NFT-tracking index fund for accredited investors; and, Nexo launches an NFT-backed lending service.

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